by Carl Neville
The ROD beeps that breath in he is in breath out range, as he steadies breath in the rifle on the bridge and takes aim at the car she drops into a squat and aims and breath out
pulls the trigger.
Rose
Twenty years ago she pushed this very bell and waited to be buzzed in, took just this lift to the third floor, new shoes too tight still, prepared her most seductive face at the door as she heard him coming down the hall to answer.
This time one of his carers responds, a tall girl with thin eyebrows and a very short fringe who is using the name Helen. Takes her into the kitchen.
Tea? she asks.
Straight tea. Yes. Fine, thank you. How long have you been caring for him?
A few years. I travelled around the country a lot when I was younger and I ended up in Castleford. I heard he was in need of a carer and so I took the position.
Ah, so you met, Goodridge?
He’s been in constant contact, a great help.
Rose feels guilty. Helen smiles. We helped each other with many things.
And Crane?
Crane too.
Rose glances at her belly.
I won’t be here at the end, when he passes over, she says. But that doesn’t matter, I suppose. We will continue to know each other in some other domain. She smiles. He used to say, I need to die again. I need to die twice to finally live. And we would ask him, when you die here where will you go? Back there, I know, I feel it getting closer every day. And when he reached the end of his natural lifespan he said he believed he would just loop around and be condemned to do it all again.
I remember, Rose says suddenly. I knew him a long time ago, when he first arrived, emerged, what is the word?
I know, she says. He spoke about you sometimes.
The observation hangs there. They both sip at their tea.
Did he write?
Oh yes, right up to the moment he lost the ability to do so, and then he dictated until his speech became incomprehensible.
What will be done with his work?
The South Academy will take it.
Music?
There are cassettes, lots of files on his Passocon. Perhaps that could go onto the Urkive.
Yes, perhaps. Well, work to be done, still perhaps some role.
They chat for a while, postponing the moment. Stories of Crane and his eccentricities, the lost dimensions of his life that neither really knew, present, past.
Then the tea is drunk. And there is no more delaying.
Would you like to see him?
Lewis
The shot takes out the front tire, shredded rubber, sparks, with a boom the car goes into the guardrail at top speed, shriek and grind, then keeps going, the driver accelerating as the bikes surrounding it skid and swerve and the suspect pulls up the rifle, begins to pivot to get another bullet into the back of the car. The taser hits, the little conical barb digs into the flesh on his upper arm and jolts him off his feet so that the shot goes awry and even the smart bullet’s automatic tracking can’t compensate.
He half falls, then rights himself as she sprints in, sprays another burst of smart bullets toward the car, then turns to face Lewis, the gun pointing at her. She decides to go over the side of the bridge, accept the drop of twenty or so feet onto the road, hopes there is nothing directly below her.
A bullet somehow bends down through the railings and grazes her cheek as she falls, her ankle grinding into the socket with the impact. She pulls a Dev out of her pocket to kill the pain, crunches it, swallows, grits her teeth as the wave of pain surges, rolls under cover of the bridge, senses the suspect has started to run across it onto the other side, and she moves too, following, tracking him still.
Let him go. He’s tagged. He can be picked up later.
But Lewis, impelled by some other deeper impulse, need, demand, keeps running.
Julia
Your father lives in the States, right? she says. He is turned away from her, busying himself with the flowers.
He lives in California.
OK, she says. I think I might have met him. Just before I came here, at a party. She must be getting mixed up. I should talk to SSF about that shouldn’t I? I mean. Sorry but your father is a, I mean I should talk to Katja, don’t you think?
Look, you must be tired, he says, why don’t you take a Dev, get some rest, you have had to take in an enormous amount, and anything that is still concerning you tomorrow you can discuss with SSF then, he turns around, gives her a reassuring smile. What do you think of the flowers? Holds them out to her. Wonderful scent, these peonies, he says, she leans forward and smells them, barely notices the scent, so distracted.
Look, it is perfectly possible you spoke to him, though unlikely I would think, but you have told me, I will pass that information on.
I’ll make some tea, why not unpack first then we can think about it some more, see where we are?
Rose
Well, there he is at the window, propped up in an adjustable bed, mouth open and his eyes rolled back in his head, arms and limbs twisted up.
He looks darker than when I last saw him.
He has been sitting in the sunlight, he’s got a tan, she says, if we move him out of the light he grows agitated. Not good for his skin, but at this stage… We joked about it, said he would be going on a journey, packed a suitcase for him, kept it by the desk then by the bed.
She glances at some pages on the desk, a title: Eminent Domain: SHADOW TEXT. Some nonsense words he has been muttering, perhaps the last semi-coherent things he said. Oneiric disjecta/cognitive spume/extruded topoi/asynchronous simultaneity.
His final babble all dried up now.
He would just repeat the same term, sometimes for days, Helen says.
She stands and looks at him for a few moments, then takes a few steps forward to reach out and touch his cheek. It’s damp with water leaking from his eyes, some saliva. Always at the window, patiently, eternally standing at the window and gazing out onto the half-understood, forbidding, impossible world in which he has found himself. Twenty years of erosion, the water levels rising, isolating more and more areas, a last few, grey overburdened islets. The deepening confusion of time and place, memory, sight and sound, a polyphony of coloured voices ringing in his ears, until, mouth agape in this bare room in which time had slowed and stuttered to a halt, nothing but a palimpsest of impossibly fine, overlaid moments sifting through him; time’s kaleidoscope.
Can he speak?
No but he can hear, we think.
Could I be alone with him for a moment? she asks, hears Helen click away across the wooden floor on her heels. She steps in beside the bed again.
Vernon, she says, pauses, leans over, presses her face to his, supports his head on its weak neck with her left hand, then eyes closed she speaks, words that she has no control over fall from her, a few simple phrases repeated over and over, confession, admission, a last whispered request, things she had never known she needed to say. Then it is over and she steps back, wipes her face with some tissues from her bag.
Julia
She starts to go through her bag, unpacking. OK sure her brain is fried, the pharms, withdrawal from the pharms possibly but still, maybe she is getting paranoid, tries to understand what if anything she could be caught up in, is she part of something larger, just a pawn in a game someone else is playing? A tap at the door and the handle goes down.
She’s locked it unconsciously, now she has to unlock it. She has left the ROD downstairs on the living room table.
She slides the bolt across, Dominic is standing there with an affectionate smile on his face, tea in a mug, over his shoulder through the open door of the bedroom opposite she can see Jennifer Bewes’s feet hanging off the edge of the bed, one of her shoes fallen to the floor.
What’s…? she asks as he steps into the room and closes the door behind him.
Jennifer’s just having a lie down too, he says, all this drama!
Tea, he says, gives it to her.
Is it too strong? Should I add some water? he asks.
Looks fine, she says
There’s a pause.
But how does it taste?
She puts it on the table beside the bed. You’re very kind, she says, but I am not really in the mood for tea right now. I have a lot on my mind. Her voice rises to a crest, the edge of hysteria, then a wave of exhaustion goes over her and she seems to shift down a level, the room growing dim, her body suddenly heavy as though the pressure in the room had dropped. No.
It was on the flowers, anyway, he says, by way of an explanation, a final courtesy as he pushes her lightly back on to the bed, a terrible crushing weight descending on her. She thinks there’s almost a look of compassion on his face.
The bare ceiling, weak sunlight, his distracted gaze, her mouth open to speak.
Limbs heavy, water-logged,
And he became the
thickening to
cold, cold clay that
pins her down on the bed and
smothered her all around
as she tries to open her mouth, to protest, my god, no. Why? And there are reasons, no doubt, that she will never know, but there is no greater sense that this senseless loss, sudden loss of everything could ever reconcile her to. He leans forward, face growing darker through the narrowing aperture, to plant a tender, mocking kiss on her lips.
The Unsent Letter
Waterston,
You remarked on our stroll how I chose Alan and how you respected that decision and so withdrew.
I never felt I chose him, I felt you pushed me away, I felt you decided that you would make a heroic sacrifice and that I was to be it. I think perhaps you only pretended to love me or love me as passionately as you claimed so that I could be a more profound, more noble renunciation, but I was never real to you Jack, just a symbol of your own virtue. As for Alan, well, he reached for me in my particularity, sought me out in my own way of being in the world.
Hasn’t that been your whole life, Jack, heroic renunciation? Stoical forbearance? The measure of your manhood, your seriousness. These are the questions, I suppose. How does one become morally serious to oneself? Through bearing burdens? Creating burdens for ourselves if we somehow can’t find enough already waiting in the world?
Perhaps the time has come to lay down your burdens Jack, push past your virtue, reach for me in my particularity while we still have time, as I will try to reach for you in yours.
Your friend,
Franklin
It’s quite painless, they say, would you like us to give you…?
He’s heard about the drugs they have here, Russian origin of course, that continue to work a few moments after death, harvest that last crackle of synaptic energy and funnel it into some final image, moment of completion, taste of paradise that sweetens the passage. Maybe you can live there, the afterlife, everything made right.
He takes a deep breath, blows out a lungful of air, something raw in his throat, takes another deep one in through his nose.
He lies down, he’s getting sleepy, fuck.
Rolls over on his side on the crisp white sheets, the metal frame at the edge of the bed, the anonymous chest of drawers.
Next bit of downtime he gets, no he’s going to make everything all right, it’s not too late to show your love, not too late to have it all, all that America promises.
That’s how it comes in, sudden, out of the clear blue sky.
Next bit of…
Dominic
The Mantis is rapidly evaporating ahead of his having to go through the scanners. Is it gone yet? Perhaps a thin layer so discreet it can’t be detected that will keep him functional until he is on the plane.
Tries to stay focused on the moment. Up on the stage some worthy is giving a talk on the protocols of passing through the Partition and entering US comms space that he tries to appear to be concentrating on.
His ROD is still tracking the investigation and he is having messages fed through to him. There is one that Barrow has not read yet that says the room in Birmingham is clear. More than that, Abhishek has gone to the flat in London where Helen lives and that too shows no trace of XV2. Barrow could read the message at any moment and then what conclusion will he come to?
Feels a panic that the virus is having little success in combating, places his hands in his lap to see if they are shaking. Careful, he is surrounded by other SSF and related members seated attentively in rows, don’t appear agitated, draw attention to yourself.
The Mantis shrivels and something both cold yet scalding, deep yet sharp begins to mount in him.
He reaches for a Dev. Apologies colleagues, the instructor up on the stage says, checking his ROD. The flight is delayed by an hour, security concerns over an attempt on Altborg.
What will that mean? Additional checks? An hour in which Barrow may read his messages, someone may call at the house on Harborne Road?
The colleague next to him sighs, odour of IPA on his breath. I could have had second helpings in the airport canteen, he says.
Waterston
They have arrived in the basement car park, Altborg having insisted on using the network of old Underground tunnels that have been connected up into a series of security pathways, giving access to some of the main buildings and zones in the city. Perhaps this is why they chose London rather than Birmingham, a fear of moving at street level, helicopters between high rises, empty subterranean systems are fine; anything to avoid all that sweating mortal flesh crawling between heaven and earth.
In this case it has proven justified, some drama in the south of the city with a decoy car attacked, empty of course but some danger presented to a number of SSF and PCSDF operatives forming part of the security apparatus around it. The Americans will still use it against them of course, another propaganda coup, as will Solchenko no doubt but, well, Squires can answer all those concerns, it is his domain now.
Into the lift, straight up to Waterston’s floor. He stands and comes around his desk to greet him as the door opens. Altborg’s entourage will be left to mill about in the corridor and the other rooms. He seems much younger than his forty-eight years. Waterston offers his hand as Altborg looks slightly past him, appears to have difficulty taking it in his, as though this simple act of coordination required focus. Is he drunk? The dossiers he has read have suggested his life is abstemious to the point of asceticism. Those PCSDF documents have been intriguing in all number of ways, and the fact that Altborg has no idea that his wife is a Russian double-agent is truly remarkable, both in terms of her skills and training and the extraordinary ability of the Russians to provide deep cover and fake information trails. Waterson smiles as his grip tightens slightly, Altborg’s face remains impassive, mask-like, perhaps he has had injections of some kind, perhaps a subcutaneous mesh attached that allows him to filter out tics and spasms of response that might betray something of his inner world, leave him vulnerable, open to insight, manipulation. He has heard such practices are common. Extraordinary. And yet he is a, what term do the Russians use? A Куколд, compromised at the deepest level. In those moments when he finally unmasks, if he ever can, his beautiful Nastya is feeding his every quirk, predilection and doubt back to the Co-Sphere. If the information is to be believed they have never consummated their affair, he refers to her in their private correspondence as my Queen of Mars, my Aelita.
Lewis
How long has she been running now, in pursuit? Hours? The man’s back floats ahead of her as she measures her pace. She has a strong sense that she has done this before, many times.
Déjà vu, chronolepsy, her natural susceptibility enhanced by the Dev she has taken to relieve the pain in her ankle perhaps. Her eyes are half closing now as the lowering, rusted sun flickers between the buildings. As she runs she senses the texture of the street begin to change, the concrete certainty of the day thin and fade.
She rounds a corner and feels the centrifugal force of the Enthusiasm they are skirting pulling at
her, begin to split and separate her out. The ROD is held in her hand like a baton and she imagines another version of herself crouched, waiting a few metres up the road ready to take over for the final leg of her mission.
Nearly there. Past the Enclave. You need get there before you do, she says to herself.
Is this still the world she lives in? The world in which no one goes hungry or unloved, no one faces old age with fear or sees their life consumed by the drudgery of work, where the pace of life has slowed and there is time for play and contemplation, to explore the world and each other, all forms of life, all species, everything fallen into the embrace of a humanity liberated at last, free from struggle and united as one world into its finer nature?
Or has she breached a barrier somewhere?
What time is it?
9:55
Back by ten, you promised your mother. Don’t be late.
Your mother? Where is she?
Home at last, the voice says, home just in time.
Franklin
Anatole. Anatole Kobrinsky. He never knew it at the time but now he can see it written on the name badge pinned to his shirt as they talked.
The Russian laughed. Connaught, casting the evil communists down into hell and leading his followers into the shining city on the hill? His accent thickened suddenly. These old myths. We have them too, of course. Deep roots. Deep, dark, tangled; we will never dig them up. Kobrinsky swivelled in his seat, took it all in, the vast blue sky dimming, the faint impress of a gibbous moon, the waves beckoning, the warm dusk promissory of an easeful death. Perfect.
He raised his drink.
Next bit of…
I wish you good luck, my friend, he said. Nasdrovia!
downtime…
Sure. Nasdrovia, tovarisch.
he has…
Luck is what he has just run out of.